Sam Burzak
 
Sam Burzak (b. 1992; she/her) is a visual artist residing in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago. She received her BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in May of 2024. 
 
At the heart of Sam's practice is a reverence for the alchemy of being human—the way grief and wonder, loss and connection, so often live side by side. Her work moves like memory itself: fragmented, luminous, quietly refusing to let go of beauty even in the dark. She works in the space between what's visible and what's felt, more interested in conjuring emotion than likeness, and in creating images that feel quietly alive.
 
Sam's process is as much ritual as craft. She draws from both historical and contemporary photographic techniques—cyanotype and silver gelatin, lumen and chemigram printing coaxed into being with light and time, medium and large format film, digital photo/video installation, and bookmaking. Across this shifting range of materials, her work returns to the same constellation of themes—grief, spirituality, our tether to nature, the passage of time, memory, and femininity—threads woven like an incantation beneath everything she makes.
 
She has exhibited with Perspective Gallery in Evanston, Illinois, Soho Photo Gallery in New York, New York, Chicago Fine Art Salon in Chicago, Illinois, Mana Contemporary in Chicago, Illinois, Side Street Studio Arts in Elgin, Illinois, Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection + Archives in Chicago, Illinois, as well as writing an article for ILFORD Photo's Online Magazine (May 2024).
 
 
 
"For most of my life, home was wherever my mother was. When she died, that home didn't disappear so much as change shape. It became something I have to visit differently now: not by walking through a door, but by working in a darkroom with light and paper and a little bit of what's left of her, waiting to see what appears.
 
These landscapes are where I go to find her—not literal places, but the feeling of a place. There's a calm to the horizons, the drifting light, the shadowed forms, and beneath that calm, a longing—the quiet ache of reaching for someone who feels so close, but not close enough. That ache hasn't gone away, but it isn't the whole story anymore.
 
Beside the diptych are smaller, live lumen prints of my mother and aster—her birth-month flower—left to shift and fade as living things do.
 
In Greek, aster means star, and it blooms among the last of the year—a small constellation of flowers still opening as most of the world is closing up for the season. As a perennial, it isn't a flower you plant once and lose; it returns on its own, year after year, without being asked. It has always been a flower of remembrance, of love that doesn't fade with the season. I think of my mother this way now: still arriving, still glowing softly in the dark after so much else has gone still—like a star that takes its time reaching you, but always does.
 
The ache and the arrival, I've learned, aren't opposites. They are two ways of loving someone who's gone.
 
These pieces are where I go to feel at home again—one made from what she left behind, one shaped from what keeps finding its way back to me, season after season, like starlight."
 
 
'Still, She Remains',
Unique silver gelatin lumen prints made with my mother's ashes and aster,
2026
32 x 40 in. each